Remember Web 2.0? Remember the semantic web? Remember folksonomies? Mash-ups? The end of information silos? The democratizing power of HTTP APIs?Anyone? Anyone?
(The mashup hype was incredible, btw. Some of the most ridiculous web contraptions ever.)
(I hereby claim the name "DJ MCP"...)
Mcp is a fad, it’s not long term tech. But I’m betting shoveling data at llm agents isn’t. The benefits are too high for companies to allow vendors to lock the data away from them.
I'd bet that while "shoveling data at llm agents" might not be a fad, sometime fairly soon doing so for free while someone else's VC money picks up the planet destroying data center costs will stop being a thing. Imagine if every PHP or Ruby on Rails, or Python/Django site had started out and locked themselves into a free tier Oracle database, then one day Oracle's licensing lawyers started showing up to charge people for their WordPress blog.
One that won't be supported by any of the big names except to suck data into their walled gardens and lock it up. We all know the playbook.
> All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.
”It” here being the boom and inevitable bust of interop and open API access between products, vendors and so on. As a millenial, my flame of hope was lit during the API explosion of Web 2.0. If you’re older, your dreams were probably crushed already by something earlier. If you’re younger, and you’re genuinely excited about MCP for the potential explosion in interop, hit me up for a bulk discount on napkins.
Nowadays the shutdown is not just of APIs but even anti-scraping, login walls, paywalls, fingerprinting, and so on and so forth. It’s a much more adversarial landscape today than during Web 2.0. When they threw copyright in the trash with the fair use loophole for AI, that obviously causes even more content lockdown panic. And in the midst of this giant data Mexican standoff, people are gonna take down their guns and see the light because of a new meta—API protocol?
I actually disagree with the OP in this sub-thread:
> "No, the accident is that the AI Agent wave made interoperability hype, and vendor lock-in old-fashioned."
I don't think that's happened at all. I think some interoperability will be here to say - but those are overwhelmingly the products where interoperability was already the norm. The enterprise SaaS that your company is paying for will support their MCP servers. But they also probably already support various other plugin interfaces.
And they're not doing this because of hype or new-fangledness, but because their incentives are aligned with interoperability. If their SaaS plugins into [some other thing] it increases their sales. In fact the lowering of integration effort is all upside for them.
Where this is going to run into a brick wall (and I'd argue: already has to some degree) is that closed platforms that aren't incentivized to be interoperable still won't be. I don't think we've really moved the needle on that yet. Uber Eats is not champing at the bit to build the MCP server that orders your dinner.
And there are a lot of really good reasons for this. In a previous job I worked on a popular voice assistant that integrated with numerous third-party services. There has always been vehement pushback to voice assistant integration (the ur-agent and to some degree still the holy grail) because it necessarily entails the service declaring near-total surrender about the user experience. An "Uber Eats MCP" is one that Uber has comparatively little control over the UX of, and has poor ability to constrain poor customer experiences. They are right to doubt this stuff.
I also take some minor issue with the blog: the problem with MCP as the "everything API" is that you can't really take the "AI" part out of it. MCP tools are not guaranteed to communicate in structured formats! Instead of getting an HTTP 401 you will get a natural language string like "You cannot access this content because the author hasn't shared it with you."
That's not useful without the presence of a NL-capable component in your system. It's not parseable!
Also importantly, MCP inputs and outputs are intentionally not versioned nor encouraged to be stable. Devs are encouraged to alter their input and output formats to make them more accessible to LLMs. So your MCP interface can and likely will change without notice. None of this makes for good API for systems that aren't self-adaptive to that sort of thing (i.e., LLMs).
In all seriousness though, I think HN has a larger-than-average amount of readers who've worked or studied around semantic web stuff.
There's a shocking overlap of GPU-slinging tech-bros hyping both. Crypto-bros turned LLM-experts out of necessity when mining crypo on their rigs became unprofitable.